Favorite Social Media Management Tools for Small Business

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Although we consult primarily for large and medium-sized businesses here at Convince & Convert, we are often asked online and in speaking engagements about social media management tools for smaller businesses. Several tools have been developed specifically for SMBs, although they’re often overlooked because they don’t get as much love from Mashable, AdAge, and beyond.

If you’re thinking about adopting a social media management tool, there are several questions you should be asking yourself and your team before you dive in. It’s important to make sure you’ve identified why you want to use a management or monitoring platform and what you hope to gain out of it. Using a social media management platform is a commitment and an investment in terms of both your time and your bank account, so picking the right one the first time is ideal. Also realize that it’s more about the wizard than the wand. No tool is a panacea. It’s about what you do with it.

Here are some questions to consider before we start looking at potential solutions:

What are you trying to accomplish by using a social media management tool?

Some answers to this might be:

Improved workflow

Keyword monitoring and listening

All-in-one view of social media channels

Better engagement across multiple networks

In-depth analysis of your social media marketing program

You might have other goals that you’re trying to achieve here. No matter what your overall goal or goals are, it’s important to identify them first.

What (specifically) are you trying to measure?

Are you evaluating user engagement over time or for a specific campaign?

Are you trying to measure the value of each post as it relates to sales?

Are you looking for increased chatter about your brand or topic across the web?

Are you stacking your brand up against a competitor to see who performs best?

How much do you care about your competitors?

Are you using your competitors as examples for what you should do?

Are you looking to see where users are interacting with competitors?

Do you want to see which topics or keywords your competitors are ranking for?

Are you not really worried about your competitors at all at this stage?

What’s your budget?

This is always a difficult question for SMBs because they’re often unsure of the value-add that a social media dashboard can provide, and therefore don’t know how much is reasonable to spend. Luckily, most of these tools include a free trial so you can start measuring and monitoring immediately. Keep in mind, however, that building up your social media presence and seeing results can take time, so don’t give up if you haven’t seen the arrows move in just 30 days.

Choosing a Social Media Management Tool

Most of the tools below have options for every type of social media scenario that small and medium-sized businesses may encounter, but certain aspects of each tool are more robust than others. This is why you should have a clear goal in mind before evaluating your options, so you can choose the one that offers the tools that are most closely aligned with your objectives.

SproutSocial

SproutSocial is a social media management and monitoring platform known for its slick dashboard and its Messages view, which pulls in all of your activity from all networks into one stream.

Pros:

Unified inbox to see all activity in one stream

Scheduling functionality

Keyword monitoring on Twitter

Easy following, responding, retweeting capabilities from directly within the dashboard

“Discovery” feature with suggestions of who to follow/unfollow based on silent/irregular accounts, who is following you, and keyword search

Workflow management features, including assignment of tasks to follow up with tweets/posts

iPhone and Android apps

Cons:

Supports Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn only, does not support Instagram or Pinterest.

Can be expensive for teams as the pricing is “per seat”.

Pricing:

30-day free trial

$59/user/month for 10 profiles (1 user)

$99/user/month for 20 profiles (1 user)

$500/month for 40 profiles (3 users)

Enterprise plans available upon request

Best for:

Improved workflow across teams

All-in-one view of all activity on all social media channels

Small budget

Agencies needing advanced reporting for clients

Agorapulse

Agorapulse is a social media management and CRM platform known for its all-in-one approach combining Social Media publishing, monitoring, statistics and contests. It’s focusing on an inbox-like approach to help you manage Social Media activity in the same way you manage you email inbox.

Pros:

Scheduling and content calendar functionality

Workflow management features including assignment of tasks to follow up with tweets/posts

Controlled access and limitations for different users

Identify most active users on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

Access to each user profile with full conversation history

Inbox-like system to easily spot new messages on each account

Easy following, responding, retweeting capabilities from directly within the dashboard

Reporting features plus exporting functionality (to Powerpoint)

Cons:

Supports Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram only

Its posting functionality isn’t great, using Buffer in addition to Agorapulse is probably needed.

Monitoring of Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and Instagram accounts in the same platform

Users who want to use a single tool for monitoring, CRM, reporting and running contests and promotions

Buffer

Buffer is probably the first tool that innovated in the Social publishing space by creating a queue system. They’ve been copied a lot, but never equalled! The product has evolved (and improved) a lot since its inception in 2011.

Pros:

Integrates with all the major social networks

Good analytics about your content performance. That helps you refine your strategy over time

Enhanced schedule times by analyzing your past performance

Sleek and user friendly interface

Integrates with all the major content platform (Feedly, pocket, CoSchedule, Scoop.it and many, many others)

The buffer sharing button is present on most blogs, so you can post content in Buffer from practically anywhere

Outstanding company culture, probably one of the best, and that goes with awesome and fast support!

It’s not possible to re-publish evergreen content automatically, you need to re-enter it manually

Price:

Free for 3 Social Media accounts

$ 9/month for 10 accounts

$50/month for 25 total accounts

$100/month for 50 total accounts

$250/month for 150 total accounts

Best for:

Publishing with ease on all your Social Media accounts

Small budgets

Raven Tools

Raven Internet Marketing Tools provides a bit more than your standard social media management or monitoring platform because it also includes SEO and advertising components, all of which you can measure and analyze individually from within Raven’s dashboard.

Pros:

Includes SEO tools for campaign research, management, and link monitoring

Scheduling functionality

Workflow management features including assignment of tasks to follow up with tweets/posts

Controlled access and limitations for different users

Includes Google Adwords integration so you can create Adwords campaigns directly inside the dashboard